Providing a much-needed check on mythopoeic archaeological inference, but also on occasion commenting on the important discoveries of the day. Every effort is made to keep the invective to a dull roar. Best plug your ears!

Saturday, 8 September 2012

Make a Note on Your Calendar: Check Out the September 21st Issue of Science

It might be nothing. But just the same I'm gonna wanna see the September 21st issue of Science. That's because yesterday I received a request to comment on my feelings about the recent findings from Roc de Marsal--that the Neanderthal child long believed to have been purposefully buried wasn't, whether or not I saw this as a vindication of my ancient efforts, and my assessment of the role of new techniques, such as micromorphology, to document site formation processes in aid of the arguments. The Science writer who did the asking mentioned that he'd just returned from a week at La Ferrassie, where the Roc de Marsal team are presently working with the same goals as their previous project. Add it up. La Ferrassie + Roc de Marsal + Science + the comments of one might be said to have foreseen it all = major story. But I could be wrong. You know... Mind befuddled by years of bitterness, suddenly brought into the spotlight, imagining the glory that never was, and all that. It could be nothing. But what if...?

I'm very proud of Sandgathe, Dibble, Goldberg and the rest for having the audacity to undertake their re-examination of the Roc-de-Marsal burial, and of the French authorities who have shown some flexibility in allowing such a project. I'm especially happy that I can claim to have had a role in paving the way for their work. As for the techniques that have been deployed in support of the new excavations at Roc de Marsal, and now at La Ferrassie, if the palaeoanthropological community is more likely to accept revisions of erroneous claims based on new techniques, I'm all for it. However, the fact remains that there never was sufficient evidence of any kind to support the claim of purposeful burial in any of these cases, a point I thought I'd made forcefully in my two papers on the matter. Unfortunately I was one of the few to have seen it that way and in reality I've been dismissed by the majority of palaeoanthropologists for the past 23 years. I'm afraid that a few ambiguous in-text citations bearing my name in the present is hardly what I'd call a vindication.

Roc de Marsal contained the partial remains of a Neanderthal youth that was claimed to have been purposefully buried. There never was any good evidence for it, although the remains were found 'in a depression' and they were articulated for the most part. In 1989 and again in 1999 I said as much. One of my major contentions has always been that depressions can occur naturally for a good number of reasons, and that depressions in caves and rockshelters--which already tend to preserve bone well--are places where vertebrate specimens can be expected to preserve extraordinarily well, as compared with those that decayed on a plane surface under the same depositional regime.
Moreover, the excavators described the 'fill' of the 'grave' as being just like all the rest of the breakdown sediments in the cave--i.e. no new stratum created at the time of the 'burial' which could be seen to be distinct from the sediments into which the 'grave' was dug and from those sediments that accumulated naturally after the 'grave' was filled in. Given the propensity for nature to create depressions, that new stratum is one of the only--if not the only--way that one could be certain that a purposeful burial has occurred. [My colleagues complain that this is rarely the case even in modern burials, and that they shouldn't be held to such a standard. My only response to that is: such thinking has given us the myth to end all myths about the Neanderthals.] Sandgathe et al. excavated at Roc de Marsal expressly to recover as much information about the depositional circumstances of the remains as was possible. It was only good fortune that the original excavators left the cave deposits adjacent the burial for the perspicacious Sandgathe and the rest of the équipe to study.
Those I'd give anything to call my Champions [sense #3 below*] will no doubt have a far more difficult time at La Ferrassie, where the remaining profile, the témoin, is well away from the area where the skeletal remains were recovered. Nevertheless, their efforts will not go unrewarded, especially since they're attempting to work out the depositional history of the site as a whole, something which has been lacking in previous work at that site.

La Ferrassie, témoin, or 'witness profile.' The Neanderthal remains were found in the lowest levels shown here. From our friends at Wikipedia.

New excavations at La Ferrassie at the close of the 2011 season. From oldstoneage.com

La Ferrassie I

La Ferrassie is, perhaps, 'ground zero' in the debate about whether or not the Neanderthals buried their dead [if you can call one voice crying in the wilderness a 'debate']. There, in the early twentieth century [and into the later second half] a series of skeletal remains were excavated, beginning with the early discovery of an almost complete skeleton, La Ferrassie I.
La Ferrassie is also claimed to have been the location of a veritable Neanderthal cemetery, based on the inferences of the early excavators. You may remember the 'nine mounds' from your introductory anthropology courses. I predicted that these would eventually be found to have been the result of cryoturbated sediments, which can take the form of wavy strata when viewed from the side. Indeed, the profile that J.-L. Heim published shows these wavy sediments in profile, presumably redrawn from the original, with the crests of the waves almost a meter above their bases. I look forward to the results of the current excavations with glee.

Early 20th century plan of the La Ferrassie 'cemetery.' From our friends at Wikipedia

*cham·pi·on noun \ˈcham-pē-ən\
1: warrior, fighter
2: a militant advocate or defender
3: one that does battle for another's rights or honor
4: a winner of first prize or first place in competition; also : one who shows marked superiority

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Hey.LIke I said. Perhaps it's nothing. But. No embargo mentioned. Just this to set the context: 'Last month I visited the new excavations at La Ferrassie codirected by Harold Dibble and Alain Turq, and we are now planning a short article for our Sept 21 issue on the work there as well as the new questions about Neandertal burial being raised by Harold's side of the team. I assume that you have seen the paper published last year in JHE on the Roc de Marsal chilid, but have attached it just in case.'It's got my spider senses tingling...

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chiefWoe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheapMay who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our smallDurance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: allLife death does end and each day dies with sleep.

About the author

My primary research interest is and always has been advancing knowledge of how hominids became human. Modern humans exploded out of Africa between about 40 and 50 kyr ago, and there is abundant evidence of recognizably human behaviour from at least that time in Africa, and across Europe, Asia and Australia. Signature modern human behaviour has not been documented unequivocally for the Neanderthals and their contemporaries, the skeletally modern members of the genus Homo (e.g. at Skhul Cave). Instead of recognizably modern implements and other hallmarks of modern human behaviour, in the Middle Palaeolithic we see lithic technology organized around flakes, obtained through bifacial reduction, some platform preparation, and retouch; no unequivocal use of bone other than as an analogue for stone; no evidence of space use that could be recognized as human; no unequivocal evidence of purposeful burial, no unequivocal representational imagery. Achievements include a BA in Archaeology (Simon Fraser University, 1987), “Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neandertal Burial” (Current Anthropology, 1989), a Ph.D. in Anthropology (University of California at Berkeley, 1994), a lectureship in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology at the University of New England, NSW, Australia, from 1996 to 1999, “Middle Palaeolithic Burial is Not a Dead Issue: The View from Qafzeh, Saint-Césaire, Kebara, Amud, and Dederiyeh” (Journal of Human Evolution, 1999), and, in aggregate, 27 months of field experience in southern central British Columbia (Salishan), Israel (Middle Palaeolithic), France (Mesolithic), Australia, California’s Coast Range, its Central Valley and Great Basin desert regions.

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